How do you get an ice cube out of a flame? Stan Meyer's gas-fridge trick
"How can you get an ice cube out of a flame?" Stan Meyer asked that as a kid, he told a room at Deer Creek, Ohio, in 1985, looking at a "gas fire refrigerator". They were real: Servel sold gas refrigerators across America, and the 1941 ad says "It freezes with no moving parts!" The design came from
The archive's own copy, 29 September 2026 29 MB
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"How can you get an ice cube out of a flame?" Stan Meyer asked that as a kid, he told a room at Deer Creek, Ohio, in 1985, looking at a "gas fire refrigerator". They were real: Servel sold gas refrigerators across America, and the 1941 ad says "It freezes with no moving parts!" The design came from two Swedish students, Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters, in 1922: a small flame boils ammonia out of a water solution, the ammonia condenses, then evaporates into a hydrogen atmosphere inside the cold box, and evaporating soaks up the heat. RV and boat fridges still work this way. Stan used the same idea on his hydrogen flame: "a heat coil here that captures… the heat from the flame. It heats the gas up, goes through an expansion tube… and allows the gas to cool down, much like that of a refrigerator." That cold, he said, cools the catalytic block and condenses the water back out at a controlled rate, with no mechanical moving parts. His Fig. 39, Hydrogen Gas Reclaim System (© 1983), draws it: a heat exchanger wrapped round the sustained hydrogen flame, piped up to a cooling coil on the gas condensing assembly above, with drinking water coming out of the catch basin. Water to flame to water, with the flame paying for its own cold. How much of the flame does the cold cost? Nobody has published the number.
About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.
Sources
- Stan Meyer · Deer Creek, Ohio · 1985
- Servel Electrolux Gas Refrigerator ad · 1941 · public domain
- Stan Meyer · Fig. 39, Hydrogen Gas Reclaim System · © 1983
- Stan Meyer, lecture, Deer Creek, Ohio, 1985, at 1:03:44 — stanslegacy.com
- Stan Meyer, Fig. 39, Hydrogen Gas Reclaim System (Water Purification), © 1983 — stanslegacy.com
- Servel Electrolux Gas Refrigerator advertisement, 1941, public domain, Wikimedia Commons
- Absorption refrigerator (von Platen and Munters, 1922; Electrolux rights 1925) — Wikipedia
shorts stanmeyer hydrogen refrigeration engineering physics waterfuelcell